I have always used what PopOS bundles. It used to be the proprietary driver, but ever since a certain driver version, they have switched to the Nvidia-made FOSS driver. Because nvidia stopped developing any sort of proprietary components in the driver and just made the FOSS driver instead, which became the “official” Nvidia driver in May 2025 i think.

Edit: Correction, only the kernel modules are all FOSS, while the userspace modules such as CUDA for example are still proprietary.

Speech note. Support a whole lot of models and you can even do some voice cloning.

For that goal, really stick by the FSF recommendations, for that, they are perfect as they have strict requirements.

But I think calling other GNU/Linux distros black box only because some drivers are proprietary is a bit too far, some people just prefer a “minimum damage” approach and that’s a compromise everyone needs to decide for themselves. If I were living in China or Iraq, however, then I would exclusively run distros like that as well.

Maybe not what you’re looking for, but there’s a program called “Money Wallet” on Android. It’s on F-Droid and free software. Maybe my favourite because every time I spend cash I just open it up and I enter what I just spent.

For professional use, I’d recommend GNU Cash, though.

The GPL doesn’t force to contribute. But if you make changes to it, you need to have these changes reflect the liberties you yourself received. Megacorporations use the so-called “Explore, Expand, Exterminate” model, the GPL stops this from happening.

Also, I have a rudimentary idea how to fix this. So if anyone who’s more competent than me would like to have a go at it, please do so.

Basically found a non-profit ad agency for free software. Basically the agency would create turnkey ad and branding concepts for certain free software projects that would like to have it and in return they get 5% of their donations, for example. All of the money gets reinvested back into the advertising for the member software projects. Also, it could be very easy, the ad agency would, in broad strokes, just have a competition parity strategy where they essentially do whatever the competition does, in broad strokes, for their advertising and “just” adapt it to what the free software project needs.

Yes, it’s some random “idea guy” on the internet coming up with something that’s coherent and smart sounding. So take it for what you will.

Oh my, yes. Before I entered the world of free software, I was turned off by it. Reason is, I thought to myself, hold on: “If it’s gratis, then it’s going to be at the level of quality from all of these malware-ridden, barely functional, shareware programs.” Luckily I’m smarter now, but free software has a branding problem. It results from these programs often being developed by incredibly competent turbo nerds, the result of this is the advertisement reads like a technical manual or a spec sheet.

Proper advertising is helpful. It informs users about what they can do with the programme. They don’t care about it being programmed in hyper-efficient C, optimized with hardware acceleration or the underlying mathematical principles of how something is being processed. They care about getting the results they want. Instead of darktable, for example, talking about “4x32-bit floating point pixel buffers”, instead, they should talk about what users can use Darktable for. Sell the fantasy of belonging to the best, only thanks to Darktable and getting superior results from the programme. Show people the stunning results that real pros got by using Darktable. Show that there is a real community around the programme, and not just a GitHub repo. These things matter.

Darktable, in my opinion, is the best raw editor out there, and yes, the “4x32-bit floating point pixel buffers” and other incredibly well thought out features are the reason why that is. But 99% of users wouldn’t know why these things listed as their features are so massively useful and make Darktable so ridiculously superior compared to the competition.

I genuinely think that if more free software projects would invest in proper advertising and branding, that GNU/Linux and free software on it wouldn’t have 3% market share, but would be the monopoly in the computing market.

Now, while not exclusively text-to-speech, but my favourite programme for that would be Speech Note.

For these requirements, I’d recommend PopOS. Thanks to its app centre being very well designed, you never need to touch the terminal for anything. Package managers are apt and Flatpak, so you get full access to basically anything that GNU/Linux has to offer. The install itself is super easy as well. I think it may be one of the best beginner distros.

Congrats on saving your parents’ master of business administration!

My recommendation would be Tor and use bridges. Bridges connect to Tor for you, and the IPs of bridges are secret. So no one really knows that you’re connecting to Tor. They can only see you connect to a random IP. For extra security you can use the “tails” OS.

While not foolproof, should be good enough for any sort of “normal” people under mass surveillance. If you’re special enough to have human attention on you, I don’t know sadly.

Finally, pictures of firewalls I can get scammed by!

If I understood correctly, it’s free software anyway, so why the discussion?

Betterbird

Recommendation

I think the Raspberry Pi has a suit of prepackaged games and things like that, which you could use. Give your Raspberry Pi a good casing, and it will be indestructible.

Tangent

I would still warn them from the dangers of the modern digital world, in the sense of surveillance and censorship of social media, what is posted on the internet stays there forever, how proprietary software tricks the user and is oftentimes malware (Gmail, Windows, etc.) and things like that.

I mean, computers are cool, but the mainstream computer world is filled with so much nonsense or outright malice. And if I had a child, I wouldn’t want them to be harmed by that. Like, I don’t want my child to be indoctrinated into the sexist manosphere, just because the Instagram Algo said so and will do literally anything to keep them on the platform as long as possible. Software and computers are cool, but there’s so much vile and genuinely dangerous stuff even for adults. For a child it must be hard to navigate. If you say, for example, that Apple devices literally scan every single picture on your device and send the result to Apple, you’ll sound like a crazed tin foil hat lunatic. But this is quite literally what happens with MediaAnalysisD. In the USA, a young family got harassed by police because they sent a picture of their sick child to their doctor via Gmail.

Edit: typo.

It’s a running gag of the GNU Linux community. Asking this question can turn any gathering between GNU/Linux users into a war zone.

EVERYONE TAKE COVER! HE ASKED IT!

DDR6 hardware is scheduled to release in 2027. If it does, I’m going to keep my schedule.

Burned out? How did that happen?

I mainly use my workstation for Image editing (raw development and VFX), 3d animation and video editing. Then there’s occasional ML inference for image generation or text generation. And lastly, some video games.

About video games: the 1st gen threadripper platform gained a bad reputation for gaming thanks to windows. I used to use Windows for so long and once I switched to GNU Linux it was like I got a new CPU for free. The reason is, Windows doesn’t know how to properly do multi-threading, adding to that, my 1st gen Threadripper is basically 4 CPU dies glued together and for low latency applications like games the performance on windows will be trash and oh boy, it was. But on GNU Linux its fine. But compared to all cores on one die, it will be worse for games, yes.